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New VL53L0X Time Of Flight Distance Sensor Now Available From Adafruit

Adafruit has this week announced the arrival of the new VL53L0X Time of Flight Distance Sensor which is now available to purchase directly from their online store priced at $14.95.

The new VL53L0X sensor board provides a great way of adding a distance/proximity sensor to your micro-controller or other electronics projects you may be working on.

Adafruit explains a little more about since uses and construction. For more details and to make a purchase jump over to the official Adafruit website following the link below :

It would be good for say detecting when a hand moved nearby, or before a robot smacks into a wall, or if your cat was trying to steal something from your workstation. Depending on your ambient light and object reflectivity, you can get about 30mm to 1.2 meters sensing range with ~5% accuracy.~

The VL53L0X is a Time of Flight distance sensor like no other you’ve used! The sensor contains a very tiny invisible laser source, and a matching sensor. The VL53L0X can detect the “time of flight”, or how long the light has taken to bounce back to the sensor. Since it uses a very narrow light source, it is good for determining distance of only the surface directly in front of it. Unlike sonars that bounce ultrasonic waves, the ‘cone’ of sensing is very narrow. Unlike IR distance sensors that try to measure the amount of light bounced, the VL53L0x is much more precise and doesn’t have linearity problems or ‘double imaging’ where you can’t tell if an object is very far or very close.

The sensor is small and easy to use in any robotics or interactive project. Since it needs 2.8V power and logic we put the little fellow on a breakout board with a regulator and level shifting. You can use it with any 3-5V power or logic microcontroller with no worries. Each order comes with a small piece of header. Solder the header onto your breakout board with your iron and some solder and wire it up for instant distance-sensing-success!